New haunt for Duncan Sheik's 'Whisper House'

MUSIC

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, April 8, 2010

Photo: Darryl Bush, The Chronicle

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Photo: Darryl Bush, The Chronicle

New haunt for Duncan Sheik's 'Whisper House'

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When Rufus Wainwright postponed the world premiere of his "Five Shakespeare Sonnets" from April to November at Davies Hall, the San Francisco Symphony found a major-league pinch-hitter for this week's concerts. Widely known for his compelling, Tony Award-winning "Spring Awakening" score, Broadway vet and indie-rock singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik ("Barely Breathing") is in town this week to perform in a song cycle based on his latest musical, "Whisper House."

The show, which premiered at San Diego's Old Globe Theatre in January following the release of a "Whisper House" album in 2009, is set in a spooky Maine lighthouse in 1942. Christopher, the lonely 11-year-old protagonist, lives there with his aunt and a Japanese immigrant lighthouse keeper. The boy's thoughts and fears are expressed by singing ghosts. "It's Better to Be Dead," they declare in the disarmingly arch opening song.

Q: "Whisper House" is set in a remote New England location during World War II. How did you get there from the 19th century German world of sexually charged teenage angst in "Spring Awakening?"

A: The play was written by my friend Kyle Jarrow. We came up with this concept that the ghosts haunting the lighthouse had been musicians prior to perishing in a boat off the coast of Maine 30 years before. They're the ones who express themselves through music. The actors in the story don't break into song, the way people usually do in that bombastic Broadway style. We wanted to do something one degree removed from traditional music theater.

Q: You also have shows about the Roman emperor Nero and the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Nightingale" in the works. What attracts you about time periods other than your own?

A: First of all it's very theatrical to imagine a different place and time. But what ultimately attracts me is that you are able to see contemporary reality through this lens of another era.

Q: What are you seeing about the world in 2010 through "Whisper House?"

A: Americans are pretty clearly outraged by what we did to the Japanese in the internment camps during World War II. But then listen to the rhetoric about racial profiling and the justifications for torture we're constantly hearing today. We say it now: How could we have treated these wonderful American citizens in this way? And yet here we go again, doing the same kind of nonsense.

Q: The songs have a kind of obsessive, haunted quality - which makes sense since they're all sung by ghosts. How did you try to achieve that in musical terms?

A: I wanted a sense of murder ballads, old-timey story songs, a certain kind of aesthetic of folk music from the early part of the 20th century. But I didn't go so far as to research a lot of songs from the period, because I didn't want to come up with some ersatz score. This is more like a version of that music that bubbles up from my own subconscious.

Q: Why did you decide to turn all the songs over to the ghosts?

A: These ghosts have a point of view, a tone that was fun for me to create. They're kind of sardonic and whimsically malevolent, a little cynical and a little above-it-all in their way of looking at the pathos of these human beings they're hanging out with. Also we wanted to work with singers who came from the quote-unquote normal music business, as opposed to people who had had these vocal coaches giving them all this bad Broadway advice. Those folks weren't necessarily going to be actors. That then allowed us to cast great actors for the human roles without worrying about whether they could sing. The ghosts become sort of like a Greek chorus. But it's also psychological: The ghosts are revealing what's going on inside Christopher.

Q: Did you really write this show in 10 days?

A: Most of it. Kyle had written a draft of the play. I think I had written one song. We sequestered ourselves in Charleston, S.C. I wrote six more songs. Then I wrote three more over the course of the next month or so. It was January to March when the entire thing was written. And recorded.

Q: Have you always worked so quickly?

A: No. But over the past couple years, I have become more prolific. Maybe it's that fear that I'm running out of time. It's also a product of having this really rich source material to draw from. When you're writing songs for your own record you're mainly just mining your own experience, which may or may not be that interesting, frankly.

Q: There's something symphonic about the meandering clarinet and brass lines in the song "And How We Sing." Is that the sort of thing arranger Simon Hale has tried to bring into the song suite you're doing at Davies?

A: For this concert, Simon and (conductor) Edwin Outwater went through the score and talked about what the basic energy of each piece could be. And how the arrangements would change. In some ways I have no idea what it's going to sound like. I don't even know if I'm going to be playing any guitar at all. I might just be singing with Holly (Brook). Gerry Leonard is going to play electric guitar, but that's more of an ambient atmospheric kind of thing. I won't know until I get there for the first rehearsal. I'm very nervous, but I'm very excited. I can't wait to hear it expand.

Q: One last thing - the musical adaptation you're doing of the Bret Easton Ellis novel "American Psycho." Between that and the Nero project, are you really a dark and stormy guy?

A: In both cases, I'm going to have to ramp up that part of my voice and make sure I don't meander back into that thoughtful, bittersweet sound. You should also know that I didn't come up with either of those ideas. I'm just the composer. I'm totally an innocent bystander.

San Francisco Symphony: Program includes Song Suite from Duncan Sheik's "Whisper House" and works by Gounod, Vivier and Poulenc. Through Sat. Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. Tickets: $15-$135. Call (415) 864-6000 or go to www.sfsymphony.org.